Bechtel Prize Judge Diana Khoi Nguyen selected Roohola Ramezani’s essay, “Seeing Before Naming: A Phenomenological Poetry Workshop That Turned My Classroom into a Field of Discovery,” as the 2026 Bechtel Prize winner. The Bechtel Prize is awarded for an essay describing a creative writing teaching experience, project, or activity that demonstrates innovation in creative writing instruction.

Of Ramezani’s essay, Nguyen shared: “When the world is aflame, new and old wars raging on, it can be too much to attempt to engage in creative writing. What this insightful and incisive essay maps is a way to be present, to tune perspective to what is immediately in front of us: a coffee mug, water bottle, or hoodie. Phenomenology is not an innovative concept, but to apply it in a concrete praxis in the classroom renders the experience of seeing, feeling, and writing as one that is transformative. This piece reminds us of ‘the simple but radical idea that we should attend to things as they appear before we explain them.’ Through guided steps and constraints, the students ‘notice things that they had never noticed before: the way a phone screen reflects their face back at them faintly, like a ghost; the way a metal zipper grows warmer the longer it is touched; the way a notebook’s pages make a soft, papery wind when flipped.’ There is much to marvel at in quietude, in the realization that even ordinary objects are alive, vibrant, and extraordinary. This essay reminds us that we can ‘bear witness by attending.’”

The Bechtel Prize is named for Louise Seaman Bechtel, who was an editor, author, collector of children’s books, and teacher. She was the first person to head a juvenile book department at an American publishing house. As such, she took children’s literature seriously, helped establish the field, and was a tireless advocate for the importance of literature in the lives of young people. This award honors her legacy. Learn more about the Bechtel Prize here.

When I asked my 10th-grade poetry students to write about a coffee mug, several of them groaned. They had been trained, by years of school assignments and Instagram captions alike, to believe that writing begins with something “important”: heartbreak, trauma, love, injustice. A mug felt small, trivial, not worthy of poetry. But when I asked them to describe it without using its name, its function, or a single abstract adjective, the room went quiet in a way it rarely does in a classroom. Pencils hovered. Students leaned closer to their desks. Someone whispered, “This is hard.”

That difficulty was the point.

They were telling me what things meant instead of showing me what they felt like. I needed a way to interrupt that habit.

What unfolded over the next six weeks became what my students later called our “Naked Object Unit,” a phenomenological poetry workshop that transformed how they saw language, writing, and themselves as writers. It was not a fully-planned curriculum. It grew out of a moment of pedagogical desperation. I was teaching in a public high school where students were capable, curious, and deeply disengaged from poetry. Their writing was fluent but empty; it was stuffed with words like love, sad, memory, identity, and pain, yet strangely detached from lived experience. They were telling me what things meant instead of showing me what they felt like.

I needed a way to interrupt that habit.

I turned, perhaps improbably, to phenomenology, the philosophical tradition that begins with the simple but radical idea that we should attend to things as they appear before we explain them. Edmund Husserl called this practice the epoché: bracketing off what we think we know in order to encounter the thing itself. I wondered what would happen if I taught poetry that way. Because of my background, I was already familiar with phenomenology, and I simply had to put its basic principles to work in the poetry classroom.

The result was a workshop that did more than improve imagery. It helped students identify as writers, discover new pathways into creative work, engage deeply in drafting and revision, connect reading to their own practice, and publish work that felt, for the first time, undeniably theirs.

The Naked Object Workshop

The core exercise was deceptively simple. Each student chose an ordinary object from the classroom or their backpack: a water bottle, a hoodie, a cracked phone screen, a pencil chewed down to a stub. Before writing a single line of poetry, they had to make what we called a “Not List.” They were forbidden to use:

• the object’s name
• its function
• its personal history
• abstract adjectives (such as beautiful, sad, important, useless)

This was our version of the epoché. By stripping away the shortcuts of language, students were forced to confront how much of their writing relied on ready-made meanings. One student stared at her list and said, “Wait, so I can’t say it’s my grandma’s necklace or that it’s sentimental?” Another asked, “Can I say it’s old?” We decided “old” was out, as it was too conceptual. They had to find another way.

By stripping away the shortcuts of language, students were forced to confront how much of their writing relied on ready-made meanings.

Next came the “Is List.” Here students wrote only what appeared to their senses: how light hit the object, how it resisted or yielded to touch, how it changed as they watched it. We talked about horizon—the place where the object met the air—and about time: condensation sliding down a bottle, warmth fading from a sleeve, dust settling on a screen.

Only after about 10 full minutes of silent observation did they begin to write their poems, eight to 12 lines, using only the material from the Is List. No backstory. No labels. Just perception.

The first drafts were awkward and electric. One student, writing about a pair of glasses, produced lines like, “Two thin moons press against my face / leaving small dents of heat.” Another, describing a hoodie, wrote, “A dark cave that smells like last week / holds my arms in soft shadow.” They were not trying to be poetic. They were trying to be accurate.

For many, it was the first time they had felt that poetry could emerge from looking rather than performing.

How Students Engaged

At first, students were frustrated. They wanted to explain what the object meant. They wanted to tell me about the person who gave it to them, the memory attached to it, the emotion it carried. But as we stayed with the constraint, something shifted. They began to notice things they had never noticed before: the way a phone screen reflects their face back at them faintly, like a ghost; the way a metal zipper grows warmer the longer it is touched; the way a notebook’s pages make a soft, papery wind when flipped.

I remember one of my students said, “I feel like I was actually there with it.” Another one, who rarely spoke in class, stayed after the bell rang to tell me, “I didn’t know you could write about something without saying what it is. It feels like a secret language.” 

That sense of being there, that sense of presence that gives us a new language, became a theme in our discussions. We read short object poems by Francis Ponge and Rainer Maria Rilke and talked about how those poets didn’t explain their subjects; they let them appear. Students began to see that reading and writing were not separate acts. Now they could easily enjoy such poems like Ponge’s “The Oyster” and “Soap,” and Rilke’s “The Panther.” They tried to do something similar in their own drafts, inventing metaphors that rose out of observation rather than abstraction.

Drafting, Revising, and Discovering Voice

Revision in this unit was unlike anything we had done before. Instead of asking, “Is this good?” or “Does this make sense?” students asked, “Is this true to what I saw?” In workshops, peers would point to a line and say, “I don’t see that,” or “You jumped to an idea here. What did it actually look like?” They were learning, in a deeply embodied way, that writing is an ethical act of attention.

They were learning, in a deeply embodied way, that writing is an ethical act of attention.

I recall one student writing about a plastic water bottle, describing it as something like “a clear ribcage holding air and wetness.” In revision, she realized she had slipped into metaphor too quickly. She went back to her Is List and noticed the bottle’s faint crinkling sound when squeezed. The revised line became something like “a thin body that creaks when my fingers press in.” It was less flashy, but more alive.

Through this process, students began to recognize their own habits: tending to rush toward emotion, hiding behind big words, avoiding specificity. They also began to develop voices grounded in perception rather than performance. They could trust that if they looked long enough, language would come.

From Objects to the World

Once students had gained confidence with objects, we expanded the practice. We wrote phenomenological poems about walking down the hallway, about breathing after running up the stairs, about sitting in the cafeteria during lunch. We banned words like stress, bored, happy, and awkward, and asked them instead to describe what those states felt like in the body: tight shoulders, buzzing legs, a hollow space behind the ribs.

This was where the workshop began to open onto social reality. One day, after a safety drill, several students asked if they could write about it. We used the same phenomenological rules. They could not say things such as fear or danger. They wrote about the sound of desks scraping, the way their breath became loud in their own ears, the flicker of fluorescent lights as the power dimmed. The poems were devastating. They did not preach or explain. They made the experience present.

In doing so, the students discovered that poetry could hold current events and social injustice without slogans. It could bear witness by attending.

Publication and Identity

At the end of the unit, we created a small chapbook of “Naked Object Poems” and shared it with other classes and with families. Seeing their work printed, students who had never thought of themselves as writers began to claim that identity. One wrote in her reflection, “I used to think poetry was for people who had big emotions. Now I know it’s for people who can look.”

Another said, “I feel like I can write about anything now, because everything has something to notice.”

That shift, from writing as self-expression to writing as attention, was the deepest success of the project.

What We Learned

This workshop did not ask students to imitate a style or master a form. It asked them to practice a way of seeing. By grounding creative writing in phenomenological attention, it gave students a tool they could carry into any genre—fiction, memoir, even journalism. They learned that before you can tell a story, you have to encounter a world.

It also created a vibrant classroom culture. Students were eager to bring in new objects, new moments, and new experiences to place under the microscope of perception. They read more closely because they were writing more closely. And they wrote with a seriousness that came from realizing that language is not just a vehicle for ideas, but a way of being with things.

They learned that before you can tell a story, you have to encounter a world.

In our phenomenological poetry workshop, my students learned a new way to meet the world. They encountered mugs, hoodies, hallways, and each other not as concepts but as presences. And in doing so, they found their own voices—quiet, precise, and alive.

What students were really learning was that perception is not passive. The mug wasn’t just “there.” It was edge against air, warmth against skin, shadow shifting as they watched. Their attention created the object anew each time they looked.

I owe this experience to my background in philosophy, a field that is often thought—incorrectly—to be at odds with literature, and especially with poetry. But I learned that philosophy can be a powerful aid in teaching creative writing.

That insight motivated me to take this work further by actively incorporating philosophical methods into my pedagogy. I later taught a course on how theories of beauty can shape creative practice, and in my current classes my students and I explore how epistemology and ethics can deepen the writing of creative nonfiction.

Featured photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash.